[RHSeeger]

> I understood his point to be that due to the heightened scrutiny given to all questions of discrimination nowadays, any sort of "holistic" evaluation was abandoned in favor of supposedly objective "Spreadsheet Mentality" evaluations.

This is exactly how I read it. Effectively, if you fire someone because you don't think they're doing a good job, you might be accused of racism/sexism/ageism/etc; even if your analysis is completely correct (and, presumably, there was no -ism involved). If you have a spreadsheet (effectively, a paper trail) of their work accomplishments, you're much safer.

[someguydave]

precisely, which ends up (in a large legally threatened corporation ) causing hiring and HR to be a racist quota system in a spreadsheet mentality with all kinds of unspoken and unrecorded workarounds in reality